The disclosed embodiments generally relate to user interfaces and more particularly to user interfaces for managing and accessing data.
Generally, personal content management tools enable people to organize, subscribe, publish and find information that resides on local systems and remote servers. These management tools are generally applied to devices with large screens with limited applications in devices with small screens and limited computing capabilities such as for example mobile communication devices. For example, devices with small screens generally only allow a user to view one page or a portion of a page of content at a time. Most mobile communication devices generally do not support viewing multiple windows where each window includes content from different documents or sources. Selecting and editing information, such as that found in web pages in a mobile devices generally is difficult as the mobile device include a limited key pad, typically a 12 key input. Some mobile devices include other inputs such as a stylus for use on a touch screen, however, the user generally has to multitask between several applications to take content from one application and insert that content into another application such as copying and pasting content from a web page to a notepad application.
Some web notebook applications allow web surfers to clip and collect information from, for example, web pages to an online notebook application while linking the clipped content back to its source (e.g. the web page). However, these applications generally do not provide their full functionality on mobile devices. For example, the mobile version of the web notebooks generally only allows a user to write notes that are transferred to the web notebook. However, these notes are stand alone notes that are manually entered and are not excerpted from, for example, a web page or other document.
It would be advantageous to be able to easily excerpt content from documents in a mobile device. It would also be advantageous to easily view the source of the excerpted content.